Those who oppose the nativist agenda justifiably celebrated when Hills Conservation Network announced in 2016 that their lawsuit to eliminate FEMA’s federal funding to the City of Oakland to our deforest public lands and spread large amounts of toxic pesticides in our parks and near our homes had proved successful. It was welcome, encouraging news, and a much needed “win” for those of us who champion responsible environmental stewardship.

Yet not long after, the City of Oakland embarked on an alternative means of achieving the very same end, their “Vegetation Management Plan”now under public comment, a plan which, like the FEMA-funded plan, seeks to not only clear cut the same beloved forests as the FEMA plan, but even more of them.

Moreover, the agency in charge of the implementation of this new plan, just like the one before it, is giving preferential treatment to native plant ideologues, ensuring that the voices of those who still champion protecting trees and eschewing poisons will be ignored in favor of the zealous, tree-hating minority which masquerades their agenda under the misleading euphemisms of “habitat restoration,” “fire safety,” and “environmentalism.”

It’s time to take the environmental movement back.

At Save the East Bay Hills, we believe that the only reason the nativist movement has gotten this far is because most people are unaware of their dystopian agenda or, if they are aware, because they falsely believe it is the responsible environmental position. It is not. When it comes to the threats faced by our urban forests and their inhabitants, there is none greater than the insidious philosophy of the native plant movement itself, a xenophobic ideology that has hijacked a once noble environmental movement - founded right here in the Bay Area - which now betrays the very ideals and causes it was formed to combat. Where the founders of groups like the Sierra Club once championed the preservation of trees and efforts to plant them throughout California by the millions, they now pursue a tree-killing, poison-spreading, beauty-destroying agenda that turns wildlife into refugees, exposes animals and people to carcinogenic herbicides, radically increases the threat of fire, and exacerbates climate change by seeking to destroy nature’s most effective carbon-sequestering tools: trees.

And though we may win some battles, we will never end the nativists’ ongoing and merciless war against nature until we change the public’s misinformed assumptions – carefully calibrated by nativists through years of misinformation, hyperbole, and censorship –​ that “native” is good, “non-native” is bad, and that decimating healthy ecosystems is how we “protect” them.

Our mission is therefore to educate the public and, in doing so, to change the climate of public opinion in which our public land management agencies and our elected officials must operate. To that end, Save East Bay Hills is launching the inaugural edition of The Skyline, our newsletter for the East Bay hills and surrounding communities.

Please help us distribute The Skyline by posting a link to it on community and neighborhood websites and forums, by sharing via email and social media, and by printing it to hand out to neighbors, friends, coworkers, or to leave on display and for distribution in libraries, cafes, and parks.

Together, we can take back the environmental movement and reorient it towards its founding mission of protecting, rather than destroying, our beloved forests.